Magnetic Ink Character Recognition or MICR is a character recognition technology adopted mainly by the banking industry to facilitate the processing of checks. The major MICR fonts used around the world are E-13B and CMC-7. Almost all U.S., Canadian, and U.K. checks include MICR characters at the bottom of the paper in the E-13B font. In addition to their unique fonts, MICR characters are printed with a magnetic ink or toner. Magnetic printing is used so that the characters can be reliably read into a system. Thus, the bottom line on a check must always be printed in the MICR typeface using a special magnetic ink, which allows the check information to be automatically read by inexpensive machines.
There are several MICR check printers in the market today that use either pre-printed or blank security check stock. However, such MICR check printers lack certain types of functionality. For example, customers may desire to acquire an accurate count of every sheet of check stock that is fed from each feeder, the number of sheets purged, sent to each finisher, and cleared through jam clearance. Current MICR check printers require a customer to restart the MICR check printer, open a text file containing “boot time” saved on non-volatile memory (NVM) that a customer service engineer (CSE) informed them about, pull out specific NVM values, run their job, restart the system, and compare such data against the same text file over and over again. As a result, this process requires a restart of the MICR check printer for every job desired by the user, and also requires specialized knowledge of an internal file produced by the print station. This is a very cumbersome process to go through in order to obtain an accurate count of every sheet of check stock that is fed from each feeder, the number of sheets purged, sent to each finisher, and cleared through jam clearance.
Consequently, none of the existing MICR check printer manufacturers has presented a desirable solution for obtaining such information quickly and efficiently. Therefore, it would be highly desirable to provide for a method and system for providing inventory control of secure stock in feeders and finishers.